May 5, 2007 12:03 AM

Broken: Mainstays Caulk Remover packaging

Scott Purcell points out:

I bought this product at a Wal-Mart in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. It is a caulk remover, which is funny enough on it's own, but adding to the hilarity is the carefully translated French text on the packaging which reads:

- Removes any type of caulk or sealant
- Pateneted design provides comfort grip and precision blades
- This would be the French version
- This would be the French version
of the above bullets

Despite the erroneous text on the packaging, the product worked pretty well and my wife was pleased athow easily it removed my old caulk.

Maybe Mainstays concentrated so much on perfecting the product design of the caulk remover that they didn't have much time left to proofread the package design!

Wow...this is definitely an example that the creators of the package were clearly not paying attention. Either that, or that the two blocks of text were placeholders for the French translation, and they forgot to translate the text...

Actually, it's a good thing it wasn't translated since the parts that weren't forgotten are horribly translated.

When will they ever learn that free translator tools found on the Internet are EVIL!

(I mean seriously, "calfatage" is the act of putting some bitumen type of subtance to fill the cracks on a ship body... It's a very specific word that no one ever use. Except free translator tools, apparently.)

I think French was the original language for this packaging. If English was the original language, someone would have surely noticed the "this would be the French text" placeholder somewhere along the product's journey from design to shipment. If the original language was French, however, a lot of people at the factory wouldn't be able to read English, and therefore would simply see a bunch of foreign words and not notice the mistake.